Featured Acquisition: The
Lester Glassner Collection of Movie Posters

Lester
Glassner collected posters for
some forty odd years, amassing a significant
collection of almost 500 pieces which
he offered to the Library of Congress
in 2001. Knowing of the Library's National
Film Registry and of the motion pictures,
posters, lobby cards and movie stills
in the Prints and Photographs and Motion
Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Divisions, Mr. Glassner decided that the
Library of Congress would be the best
home for his collection.

At his home, where he
loved to sit in a tubular chrome chair
from an old Twentieth Century-Fox screening
room, he perused the shelves filled with
books about movie history. One shelf was
entirely filled with material about his
favorite films: The Wizard of Oz and Gone
with the Wind. Posters for these
films are among the many treasures included
in Mr. Glassner's collection. Other rare
titles included are: All About Eve, Rebecca, Meet
Me In St. Louis, Mildred
Pierce, Sunset Boulevard,
and a poster for the original release
of Snow White. Eighteen titles
match those on the National Film Registry,
and fifteen titles reflect Oscar winners
over the decades.

The collection begins
with a 1921 color lithographic poster
(displayed here) for The Adventures of Tarzan, starring Elmo Lincoln. Elmo Lincoln,
born Otto Elmo Linkenhelt, was the first
of many Tarzans. He was a giant of a man,
especially for that decade, measuring
6'1" and weighing 230 pounds. The
first Tarzan film, Tarzan of the
Apes, was released during World War I, and when Winslow Wilson, hired
to play Tarzan, felt the call to serve
his country, Elmo Lincoln was offered
the role. He was a brilliant success and
the film was a huge hit, the first feature
film to earn over a million dollars. He
starred as Tarzan in two later films, The
Romance of Tarzan (1918) and The
Adventures of Tarzan (1921) and
played other supporting parts in several
action films. Previous to his Tarzan role,
he was selected by D.W. Griffith to play
a supporting part in The Battle
of Elderbush Gulch (1912), multiple
roles, including the blacksmith, in Griffith's Birth
of a Nation (1915), and the Prince's
bodyguard in Griffith's Intolerance (1916).

The Glassner collection
continues with both classic titles and
foreign films, with the majority dating
in the 1930-1950s. Major stars featured
are: Fred Astaire, Ingrid Bergman, Joan
Crawford, Clark Gable, Judy Garland and
Greta Garbo, and all film genres, westerns,
war, science fiction, comedy, horror,
melodrama, suspense, high art, musicals,
classics and animation are included. The
Glassner collection mirrors American cultural
taste and shows the influence of American
culture abroad. It dovetails with the
film materials already in the collection
by filling gaps in both titles and stars,
studios and producers, and provides insights
as to how our life style values have changed
over time. Fashions, prejudices, propaganda,
and social customs can all be found in
poster art at one time or another, and
the Glassner collections strongly supports
this fact.

This collection is
currently unprocessed and is served
by advance appointment.